1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the selection of advertisements for display in online web pages.
2. Background
According to one definition, advertising is a paid, one-way communication through a medium in which an advertiser is identified, and the message (i.e., the advertisement) provided by the advertiser is controlled. Advertising may be performed for a variety of purposes, including publicity, public relations, product placement, sponsorship, underwriting, and sales promotion. A variety of mediums are used to convey an advertisement, including television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and billboards.
Online Advertising relates to the promoting of products and services using the Internet and World Wide Web. Typical online advertisement types include banner ads, floating ads, pop-up ads, and video ads which are provided through a browser to the user's computer desktop. “Contextual advertising” refers to a form of Internet advertising/marketing where advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on content displayed to the user. For example, a contextual advertisement selection system may scan the text of a web page for keywords, and select advertisements based on any keywords located in the text. When the web page is displayed for the user, contextual advertisement selection system provides the selected advertisements for display on the web page.
Dynamic web pages which are generated with client-side scripting languages (e.g., JavaScript or similar scripting languages), have contents which may change without generating new “page views” (e.g., changing a portion of the contents of the web page without a complete reloading of the web page). The contents of a dynamic web page may change due to a user interacting with features of the web page, for example, but the web page as a whole is not reloaded. As a result, the real-time state of the dynamic web page (which the user sees at any particular moment) may change substantially from the original, initially-loaded web page content. Current advertisement relevance matching techniques are based on page view events, where advertisements are matched to the contents of a web page at the time the web page is loaded. As a result, as the user interacts with the dynamic web page, and the content is modified, the advertisements in the web page may become less relevant to what the user is currently seeing and experiencing.